ICLR 2026
The International Conference on Learning Representations heads to Rio de Janeiro for its first South American edition.
About this event
ICLR, the International Conference on Learning Representations, is the youngest of the big three ML conferences but arguably the most focused on the ideas powering modern AI. Founded in 2013 by Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, ICLR pioneered the open-review model on OpenReview.net, making every submission, review, and rebuttal publicly visible. The 14th annual edition takes place April 23-27, 2026 at Riocentro in Rio de Janeiro, the first time ICLR is hosted in South America.
The technical program centers on representation learning broadly defined, covering deep learning architectures, foundation models, self-supervised pretraining, generative models, alignment, and emerging directions like world models and AI agents. Expect five days of orals, thousands of posters across the cavernous Riocentro halls, an industry expo, and workshops on topics ranging from mechanistic interpretability to AI for climate. The open-review process means reviewer discussions are part of the public record, a transparency norm that has spread across the field.
ICLR draws roughly 8,000 attendees, with strong representation from academic labs and frontier AI companies. The Rio location is expected to boost participation from Latin American researchers and to make the conference more accessible to underrepresented regions. Beyond the technical program, attendees get five days in one of the most photogenic cities on earth, with Copacabana, Sugarloaf Mountain, and Christ the Redeemer all within reach of the venue. For researchers focused on the foundations of deep learning, ICLR is unmissable.